Chapter 15:
Synthesis What It All Amounts To

By C.J. Campbell

From The Coming Oil Crisis

If you have come this far, you deserve a medal. If you have simply browsed, that will have served its purpose too if it has prompted you to think more about the implications of depleting a finite resource and the coming production peak. We are not used to depleting things, being confident that we can always run into the supermarket and replenish our stocks. And, we prefer not to think about the end of the one finite resource we do know about only too well: our own life-span. But in the 21st Century, we will come to experience the virtual depletion of oil, an energy source that has become central to our way of life. We will have to change the way we live. It is not too soon to start thinking about what that may entail.

In this last chapter, I will try to sum up the message of this book.

THE FORMATION AND ENTRAPMENT OF OIL AND GAS

Oil is derived for algae that proliferated from time to time in the Earth s long geological history. Gas comes from plant remains and is more widely distributed. On death, the organic material sank to the bed of the sea or lake from which it was derived, or was washed in from the surrounding land. In most cases, it was dissolved or destroyed, and only rarely in stagnant troughs was it preserved and concentrated. The resulting organic-rich layers were buried by other sediments, and with further subsidence became heated by the...

OVERVIEW
We now come to a semi-philosophical concept: the idea of an Ultimate recovery. How can anyone contemplate the ultimate of anything: it is like thinking about infinity. We naturally shy away...